Today, in the Men’s Rights subreddit, we find Demonspawn, a long-time fixture in Reddit’s MRA circles, getting dozens of upvotes for a comment in which he advocates murdering family court judges and other government officials:

Demonspawn is responding to a post from Robert Franklin on Fathers and Families about Dan Brewington, “[a]n Indiana man fac[ing] five years in prison because he criticized the judge and the custody evaluator in his divorce and custody case.”

Or at least that’s how Franklin wants to frame the issue. While conceding that Brewington “often used intemperate language” on his blog, Franklin downplays what seems to have been a relentless four-year harassment campaign from the troubled father. According to a report on the case on the Eagle Country Online website:

[P]rosecutors argued that Brewington took his postings beyond being critical of the court system. They became personal against anybody who became involved with his case.

“This was sick revenge dragging my wife and kids into the matter,” Humphrey said during his testimony. “I don’t know of many cases where a subject has more clearly expressed his intent to do harm.” …

Brewington … called [custody evaluator Edward] Connor a child molester and prostitute in his “Internet rampage,” contacted the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky where Conner is involved as a board member, and sending mass e-mails to Connor’s colleagues and legal professional around the area. …

Connor’s wife, Dr. Sara Jones-Connor, reaffirmed what her husband shared with the judge.

“For over four years we have dealt with his attacks on a daily basis,” Jones-Conner said.

And Franklin leaves out the most serious of the accusations against Brewington: that he threatened to murder the judge.

Brewington’s cellmate at the Dearborn County Law Enforcement Center for two-and-a-half months, Joseph McCaleb, had sent a letter to jail officials on September 25 after being concerned with what he heard from Brewington.

“He talked about following (Judge Humphrey) home, shooting him, and dumping him in the river,” McCaleb said of Brewington’s alleged “detailed and thought out” plan.

I should note that after testifying that Brewington’s threats seemed serious, McCaleb later concluded that they weren’t; and Judge Brian Hill did not take his testimony into consideration when sentencing Brewington.

Was Brewington’s sentence fair? I don’t know. But Franklin’s posting was misleading, to say the least, if not dishonest. And while a few people raised questions about it, no one on the Men’s Rights subreddit bothered to spend the two minutes on Google that would have turned up the story I’ve been quoting from, instead relying entirely on Franklin’s, er, incomplete account.

Whether or not Brewington’s threats were sincere, Franklin’s post had Demonspawn and many others on the Men’s Rights subreddit thinking violent thoughts themselves. Here are some more selections from the discussion there. Note that every single violent comment I quote below got upvotes from the regulars.

Here, Boss_Money invokes the memory of Tom Ball, who killed himself in hopes that his dramatic suicide would encourage other MRAs to start firebombing courthouses and police stations:

Later in that same thread, coldacid suggests that suicide is a much less effective strategy than murder:

The Men’s Rights subreddit is by and large the most “moderate” of all the major Men’s Rights forums online. But this is the language, and the thinking, of a hate movement. Anyone who really cares about improving life for men needs to call this kind of thing out, and make clear that it is completely unacceptable in any rights movement worthy of the name.

Comments

The whole “do anything to get his kids back” deal reminds me of how some guys react when someone hurts their female friends.

They say “I’ll do anything to help you”–then offer to kick the guy’s ass.

But when the women say “No, I don’t need that, that wouldn’t help and it might get me in even more trouble, I just need you to be a supportive friend right now,” they don’t want to hear it.

Dudes need to stop saying “I’ll do anything” when they really mean “I’ll do anything so long as it makes me feel like a Big Man.”

I dunno, maybe we need more action movies where the hero’s sacrifice is an actual sacrifice, as opposed to something super glamorous and adrenaline-pumping. “I love you so much I’ll do things that actually help you” means a lot more than “I love you so much I’ll blow things up for you.”

Yeah, I found it. I didn’t remember his name, and like Unimaginative, when I used search terms to find him, a lot of stories of men burning their children just this year popped up, and made me feel extremely ill.

@Stephen Blue:
“Are there disurbed people in the MRA movement? Yes, but there are far more equally disturbed people in the feminist movement and the feminist movement is by nature disturbed, as it seeks to correct unjustices that were either never real, or long ago vanquished.”

Really. Please find me a feminist site where posters regularly praise women who murder their exes or who massacre groups of unsuspecting and unarmed men at random or constantly talk shit about how All Those Slutty Men are going to Get What’s Coming To Them Soon. The MRA movement is like any other supremacist movement in that it attracts almost nothing but the disturbed, the violent and the vicious. Your “FEMINISTS IS WORSE!!1!” argument doesn’t hold water and you know it, you minimizing apologist dolt, and neither does your attempt to negate every single violence-celebrating scumbag on your side of the fence with your measly screed. Take that shit to the people who are actually talking guns and firebombs and see how long it takes you to get called a mangina for it.

There is one positive side to all this. MRA’s are truly cementing their status as terrorists with all this talk of violence and celebration of actual acts of violence. And you know what? Western governments do not negotiate with terrorists. Nobody negotiates with terrorists.

Women may be raped, but men are also the “victims” of “date robbery” and “date rejection”.

Wow, there goes my last shred of “maybe Farrell is one of the reasonable, moderate ones.”

I initially thought “date robbery” sounded like some kind of “friendzone” type term, but it is apparently the practice of drugging and robbing people on a date, so it doesn’t have the deranged entitlement I initially thought it did.

He still sounds like a shitlord, though. Please somebody tell me he did not compare rape to rejection, please.

I figured “date robbery” was where you paid for dinner and didn’t get laid.

Good to hear that it’s describing actual robbery, I guess, even if it’s kind of ridiculous to imply those robberies happen with any significant frequency.

“Date rejection,” though, Jesus Christ. I guess if I say yes to dating a guy but don’t want to date him literally forever, it’s a crime on a level with date rape? …Like I said, you think you’ve found a moderate one…

I initially thought “date robbery” sounded like some kind of “friendzone” type term, but it is apparently the practice of drugging and robbing people on a date, so it doesn’t have the deranged entitlement I initially thought it did.

But that is not the practice to which Farrell is referring. In the excerpts from the book “Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate”:

Robbery-by-Social-Custom: She Exists, He PaysTo shorten the period of potential rejection, men learn to pay for all of the 5 D’s– Drinks, Dinner, Driving, Dating, and then, if he is successful at repeatedly paying for the first 4 D’s, he gets to pay for the fifth: the Diamond. Or, more precisely, a diamond with the right 3 C’s (carrots, color and clarity). Together, the expectation for him to pay for these 5 D’s can feel like robbery-by-social-custom: she exists, he pays.

Hmmmmm….. perhaps I should change my avatar to “Buy diamonds, get carrots”

“She exists, he pays?” Dude, if you’re dating a woman for no reason other than “she exists,” I give her my permission to milk every cent she can out of you, because there’s sure as hell nothing ELSE in it for her.

Huh, looks like I spoke too soon. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt was a mistake. What a total shitlord.

“Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate”

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard about that before, here or on SRS. As I recall, someone mentioned that they saw it in a bookstore, noticed that it had only male contributors, and put it back on the shelf. A decision eminently justified, by all appearances, although I must admit I want to know if the three Cs further lead into the twelve Ms, the two Js, and the Q.

• Any given black man is three times as likely to be reported a rapist as a white man
• Do blacks suddenly have more political and economic power?
• Rape does not derive from power, but from powerlessness. P.310

wut

• Minimizing the role of sexual attraction in rape denies our responsibility for reinforcing men’s addiction to female sexual beauty and then depriving men of what we’ve helped addict them to. P311

wut

• Laws with broad definitions of rape are like laws making 55 mile per hour speed limits for men and no speed limits for women.

• We call women who are nurses “helping professionals” but not police “saving professionals.” P.116

• If a fetus has a “right to life,” but eighteen years later has an “obligation to death,” which sex is it? P.130

• Black men, Indian men, and gay men have all have something in common: They do not provide an economic security blanket for women. P.206

• We don’t call the westerns or war movies “violence against men”–we call them “entertainment.” P.223

• If a female employee is offended, a boss would like her to tell him, not sue him. P.294

Yeah, I bet he would.

• When a driver bribes a cop, both are charged with bribery; so when a female has sex with a professor, shouldn’t both be charged with bribery? P.302

• The most frequent way men are raped by adult women is “birth control rape.” P.335

Okay, that one’s not funny, except, holy shit, dude, men get raped for real, why do you have to spend half the book coming up with things that are “like rape” except for not being rape?

So far we’ve got:
-Being unemployed
-Having to pay for dates
-Having a woman break up with you
-Having a woman not use birth control

Even if he wants to argue that these things are really bad (and some of them are!), saying they’re just like rape is incredibly stupid and narrow-minded, and makes men who’ve actually been raped into collateral damage for his feminist-baiting.

If a man consents to sex based on the condition that the woman is using birth control, which she has claimed is met, but she lied- is that technically rape?

There’s a parallel there with… is it the Julian Assange case I’m remembering? A woman consenting to sex using a condom, then being raped as the man wasn’t using a condom. The two situations seem broadly equivalent, apart from the fact that in one of them it’s a lie and in the other it’d need to be physical forcing.

I’m not aiming for any broader point here, really, just trying to reinforce my understanding of things.

So, yeah, even in the more superficially equal case of lying about being on birth control versus lying about having had a vasectomy, the vasectomy’s got more consequences for the partner’s body than the other one, and there aren’t any it doesn’t have.

Farrell is a hack who’s makin’ the big bucks and livin’ the dream off the backs of men who have been disenfranchised by a culture/society/civilization that, as MRAs are so wont to keep reminding us, were and are created BY MEN. And he does this, obviously quite effectively, by shifting the focus from the power relations BETWEEN MEN to the powerLESSness of men at the hands of the shadow conspiracy government of women.

MorkaisChosen — glossary troll brought that up about the Assange case, and near as I can tell, it’s a nearly irrelevant factor — he’s being charged with something about “unsafe sex” (which certainly implies STD risk, not pregnancy risk, but I can’t read Swedish). Except, well, the whole thing about only consenting with a condom? Was hour(s) before she woke up to him atop her, without a condom — it’s not exactly the important factor there.

Why is it when these guys come somewhere close to a real thing they immediately take a left turn into crazy town and avoid things that are actually issues men have to deal with. Like @Cliff Pervocracy said, men are actually raped, why not deal with that? (something tells me b/c then they don’t get to hate on women about it).

Also, I don’t know if it occurs with any frequency (or if it is just men who this happens to), but an ex/now good friend of mine was drugged and robbed in Vegas (before I knew him). He was drunk and playing blackjack and winning at one of the tables inside a night club. A women approached him, they had a few drinks, left together in her(?)/a(?) limo. She had drugged him earlier in the bar. While in the limo she started performing (consensual) oral sex and when she noticed he couldn’t talk, or move, she took his wallet and dumped him (pants down and exposed) on the side of the street unable to talk or move or help himself. He says he was terrified and laid there in the street for god knows how long before he was able to move again and make his way back to his hotel. That sounds more like an actual “date robbery” to me.

Again, my point is just…there are actual things that are harmful to men that have nothing to do with feminists. (hint: feminists would work WITH men in trying to stop male rape or the situation I described above – and DO work to stop these things). The more they make these false equivalences and ignore actual real life things the more clear it becomes that they only formed their little group to have an outlet to hate on women because they are women.

I initially thought “date robbery” sounded like some kind of “friendzone” type term, but it is apparently the practice of drugging and robbing people on a date, so it doesn’t have the deranged entitlement I initially thought it did.

The only thing like this that I’ve ever heard of is when a prostitute drugs and robs her john. That’s not a date.

Also, sorta off topic but I noticed there was someone who I’m pretty sure was here before I got here that goes by the name @Molly Moon. I don’t want any confusion between us so I am planning on changing my handle…I just haven’t thought of one I’ll like and want to stick with yet. I’ll change it as soon as I’ve got one. Sorry @Molly Moon. Didn’t notice there was someone with such a similar name when I signed up here.

Hmmmm. For the life of me I can’t remember with 100% certainty whether he said the woman was a prostitute or not. I’m pretty confident if she was he would have said so (he would not be at all embarrassed about telling me something like that) and I think I would’ve remember it if she was a pro. From what I remember she was, from his perspective, just a woman he met at the club. I’ll ask him to see if I’m just misremembering. But I don’t wanna just text him or call him and say “hey by the way, remember when you were drugged and robbed? Was that a hook up or a pro?” I’ll think of a way to respectfully approach the subject and find out.

Tulgey Logger – There’s a lot in there about how men are “unpaid bodyguards” for women, which I guess refers to any boyfriend/husband who would defend his girlfriend/wife instead of dropping her and saving his own hide in a crisis?

So having basic loyalty to loved ones is a form of oppression against men.

…It’s stuff like this that makes me realize just how short they are on real oppressions. When you’re getting paid 70 cents on the dollar and if you speak up you get threats to beat and rape you, you don’t need to make so much up.

Like I said, the fucker thinks women don’t work, haven’tw orked, and will not continue to work. He seriously seems to write his shit through the lens of “LEave it to beaver was an accurate reflection of reality”.

False. This is actually an excellent example of the shortage of problems feminists have to complain about; you have to keep misrepresenting, twisting, and strawmanning the wage gap, which doesn’t really exist in the way you’d like to present it.

False. This is actually an excellent example of the shortage of problems feminists have to complain about; you have to keep misrepresenting, twisting, and strawmanning the wage gap, which doesn’t really exist in the way you’d like to present it.

Right, this is all only because women choose to take lower-paying jobs in order to be with their children more, which is totally unconnected to the fact that fathers very rarely have to make that choice. It is also totally unconnected to the fact that traditionally female jobs are lower-paid than traditionally male jobs regardless of the value they produce, and even women who want to break the mold have trouble getting hired for traditionally male jobs.

This is true. People who rape- a lot of them, anyway- do so because they feel powerless, and want to get some of it, if only for a brief period of time. This is a classic power rapist, which is the most common variety.

False. This is actually an excellent example of the shortage of problems feminists have to complain about; you have to keep misrepresenting, twisting, and strawmanning the wage gap, which doesn’t really exist in the way you’d like to present it.

Even the CONSAD report, which went way out of its way to try to minimize it by removing several forms of pay from counting, and not actually discriminating between full and part time workers, found a pay gap of 14%. That is *After* going well out of its way to make it seem smaller. It varies by industry, but 20 to 30% is substantially more accurate. And that’s just the pay gap; there’s several others, including a bias against getting hired in the first place.

Trufax: When me and my girlfriend went on a date, we just batted our eyelashes at a nearby nondescript male and he paid for both our dinners, and for the gas. Then we cruelly cackled and denied him the sex he was due.

Right, this is all only because women choose to take lower-paying jobs in order to be with their children more, which is totally unconnected to the fact that fathers very rarely have to make that choice.

That is indeed part of the reason; that situation can be analyzed as a cultural problem, but it’s not a result of direct discrimination.

Secondly, there’s also the fact that the older, wealthier, more established professionals in most industries (ie, where much of the wage gap can be attributed) are mostly men, because those men got their start when society actually was sexist.

Thirdly, yes, on the whole, I do believe women are naturally more inclined to childcare. That’s heresy here, I know.

The evidence seems to point to the wage gap drastically eroding in the coming generation. Oh look:

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